HA: Feds patent onion routing (Was: Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps)

[Greg Broiles]

At 01:00 PM 8/18/2001 -0600, Zakas, Phillip wrote:
>         > Declan wrote:
>         > Syverson, who is listed on the patent with co-inventors
>Michael Reed
>         > and David Goldschlag, defended the government's move. "It is a
>         > necessary step for those of us working for the government to
>bring
>         > technology to the public," Syverson said.
>
>         How about simply publishing a paper on the topic (and actually
>I've been reading papers from the onion router project for several
>years...since 1996??)  Since when were patents necessary to 'bring
>technology to the public'?

That was my first reaction to those comments.

I think what they're talking about is the process of "technology transfer", 
whereby people are paid by the government to develop new technology, then 
quit their low-risk low-pay government jobs for private sector jobs 
commercializing the technology they developed earlier, selling implemented, 
commercial (or mil-spec) versions back to the government. (One variation of 
this has the developers handing off the technology to old college friends 
or agency predecessors, who are generous enough to grant them stock options 
in the private company). It's much easier to commercialize the technology 
if it's boiled down to one or more forms of traditional intellectual 
property, like patents - it was only attractive to invest in open-souce 
companies for a year or so, and that was a few years ago. If you hurry, you 
can still buy some Red Hat stock before it gets delisted, which has got 
some old cypherpunk C2Net and Cygnus DNA in it somewhere.

If they want to make the technology widely understood and used, that's easy 
- write up a nice paper for Crypto or FC or one of the ACM or IEEE 
journals, with a corresponding project on Sourceforge. It's not like 
federally developed works even need a license - they're not properly the 
subject of copyright.

On the other hand, if they want to make big piles of money selling that 
technology back to the taxpayers who funded its development, locking it up 
for 20 years isn't such a silly choice.

This strategy is an especially nice one for privacy technologies like 
remailers - there's no good consumer market for them, but governments and 
other big actors have a strong need to hide their actions from public 
scrutiny from time to time, because they've got a lot more to lose by 
getting caught. So it's a neat little commercial backwater where it ought 
to be possible to charge a few customers a lot of money for technology they 
can't buy anywhere else because (a) it's not widely understood or 
available, and (b) the vendor has an exclusive patent license, and can 
eliminate competitors. (free software isn't a competitor, because 
anonymizing is a service, not a product or a computer program, so it 
doesn't matter if there are infringing cypherpunk versions.)


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids